


The Words We Learn Alone

by deliverusfromsburb



Series: Tuesjade Prompts [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, TLC compliant, postgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 09:55:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13051647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: tuesjade prompt: old-fashioned





	The Words We Learn Alone

You grew up talking with the gods of universe B2, but you grew up reading about the ones from B1 in the tattered volume left in your meteoric prison. When you look at them, you can almost see the loops and curls of Rose's handwriting superimposed over their faces. "Forgive me the quaint device of introducing the cast of characters," she'd written, "but if anyone finds this account in the future, they might as well know in whose incapable hands the fate of reality was entrusted, if only so they can curse the gods by name." You’d thought it was funny, then. Now, as you watch the gods of the new world argue over whether to put chunky or creamy peanut butter on the shopping list, you think she had a point.

"We only have the illusion of freedom," Rose reminds them. "Jane's father will be double checking whatever we decide on anyway, so we don't splurge on personal twelve-packs of Mountain Dew."

"Now we have to do that," Dave says. "Alchimeters never got the carbonation right."

John elbows his sister. "You've been missing out on drinks that can go up your nose."

"Like sasparilla?" she asks.

He frowns. "Saspa-what?"

"It's an old-fashioned word for a kind of soda," Rose tells him.

"You mean pop," John says.

Dave holds up an admonishing finger. "I'm afraid it's coke.”

Rose shakes her head. "That's a brand."

His alternate self interjects. "Coke transcends brands. That's two to one, you're outnumbered by us, God, and the laws of nature."

"That's not fair," John says. "It's like you're voting twice."

Jade groans. "I'm sorry I said anything about your silly sugar water."

The beverage taxonomy issue is tabled, and they settle on creamy peanut butter. Rose leaves to deliver the list to Jane’s father, and the boys depart bickering over voting rights. Jade stays seated, rolling the pen they were using away and calling it back with flicks of her index finger. Beyond the glare of the Green Sun, her power is muted, but she’s working on finer control.

You can see Rose sitting in the paneled halls of your meteor, pen to paper. _Jade Harley, our session’s Witch of Space. The only one of us with any common sense. I should have more to write about her than I do, but she kept a lot to herself. Does she not trust us?_

_Maybe I should have asked better questions._

Rose described her friends for you in anecdotes and psychological sketches. She’d tried to stay clinical for imagined posterity, providing bulleted lists of their strengths and weaknesses and making predictions for what her absent friends would be like in three years. At times, though, especially later in her journal, sentiment had crept in. She’d share an anecdote, comment on some trivial detail and then apologize for it. That’s how you came to know them. In truth, text is how you came to know everyone, when all your interactions were through messages you sent to each other, what you chose to share or keep to yourselves. You love words, but they can only do so much. They condense people to characters, and when they do, it’s so easy for those characters to go off script.

“I use the wrong words too,” you say.

Jade looks up. The pen skitters off the table, unheeded. “What?”

“I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to speak. I learned from things that were left behind.” The laptop your troll semi-guardian left behind for you contained old chats with strange slang – words like hive and respite block. You’d hoped a foreign affect would hide the idiosyncrasies, but your anachronisms were from a lot further than across the pond.

“I noticed when I met you,” Jade says. “You didn’t lift your questions at the end. I used to do that.”

Questions rise in pitch, you’ve found. A flat tone means it’s a statement in disguise. Words gain so much based on how they’re spoken. They don’t have that life on the page, only a semblance given by italics, underlines, emoticons. You have a lot to learn.

"I mispronounced things too,” Jade continues. “I thought purpose rhymed with propose, it sounded stronger that way. And Dave said he'd pay me to ask Rose about "peskyology" when we all met up."

"Pesky...” You hesitate. “Oh, psychology?"

"That's right." She laughs. “It fits, doesn’t it? Especially since she uses it to mess with people’s heads.”

“I suppose it does.”

“The dictionary had a pronunciation guide, but the IPA is confusing. It was bad enough that I didn’t know which words I should use… people laughed when I used the bigger ones, so I tried to stop.” She sticks out her tongue. “I don’t dumb myself down anymore, but then my vocabulary isn’t as surprising at sixteen as it was as a kid.”

You nod. "It’s hard to know what to say sometimes. Dirk and Roxy did something similar before they revealed they were from the future.” You remember the way you all danced around each other – you concealing your true species, Dirk and Roxy trying to talk like they hailed from 2011, Jake with his bravado and Jane not wanting to admit she was an heiress. “It's like we were all putting on our own acts."

Jade retrieves the pen from the floor with a ‘come here’ gesture and clicks it closed. "I know what that's like."

“It’s hard growing up alone, isn’t it?”

She touches an ear with a self-conscious laugh. “It’s a miracle I didn’t grow up totally feral.”

Feral. When you’d been truly alone, is that what you were? No, your other self was stone-smooth and just as hard, more like a goddess than a child in the garb of one. You know which version you prefer. “I’ve seen what I would have become. I’m glad I had what I did.”

Jade shakes her head. “I can’t even imagine how bad I might have gotten without people to talk to. When we made it through our first session and I wasn’t living alone anymore, that was the best day of my life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, even with all the problems and arguments that came after.”

An argument would be a good collective noun for the group of you. But you wouldn’t give it up either. From the moment John came for you after you’d risen, bewildered, in the wreckage of your session, you’d been dragged into a whirlwind of colours and mayhem, and you wouldn’t trade in a moment of it. You’re no longer watching a story of an octet of faraway gods, their consorts, and their compatriots. You’re living it.

Rose had compared them, tongue in cheek, to archetypes from a heroic narrative. The fearless leader. The reluctant hero. The sacrifice. “I guess I would be the bad one,” she wrote. “The stubborn child who doubted the fantasy paradise they’d stumbled into. It’s not inaccurate. I’m still not sure I was wrong.”

Jade had been labeled the wise one. That was the part you’d carved out for yourself too, the mysterious messenger bearing knowledge and keeping secrets. Rose had placed them into those rote roles to mock the practice, but it caught your fancy. Once upon a time, you painted people in broad strokes. But you’ve met a version of yourself who only saw the big picture. You’ve learned the value of detail. “I like the arguments too,” you say. “They’re charming.”

“Not the ones we used to have.” She shrugs. “Or maybe they would be, from an outside perspective. I mean, John yelling so hard he passed out was pretty objectively funny, if you weren’t caught up in the moment.”

You giggle. “I remember seeing that in the clouds. I drew it. He reminded me of my brother throwing a tantrum, although don’t tell him that. He might find the comparison is insulting, and well he should.”

“I won’t tell if I can see the picture.”

“Oh, it’s long gone.” Your brother destroyed a lot of your artwork, and what was left is lost somewhere in the wreckage of your planet or far future Earth. You miss it sometimes – so much work, gone. It’s probably a good thing your fanfiction didn’t survive, though. “Maybe I’ll redo it for our illustrated account of your adventures.”

She grins. “I’ll describe it in _detail_. You need to get his legs sticking up just right.”

“I’ll make sure we include it in the authoritative summary of our epic.”

“It won’t be worth it otherwise.”

And she’s joking, but she’s right. Detail is where the people are. In their foibles, their silly spats, their embarrassing moments. If you wrote about Jade, you’d include the way her forehead creases when she concentrates, her favorite kind of peanut butter, the way she mispronounced purpose for the first thirteen years of her life. That’s important.

Who knows what stock character Rose would assign you, but in your own mind you have always been the storyteller. That can lead you down dangerous paths when you make the world your journal, but it doesn’t have to. The universe is made of DNA and song. Both boil down to letters. Those are constructs, symbols used to make sense of sequences of acid or sound waves, but everything is. You are all stories telling themselves. And while you might not welcome an editor with a red pen coming to slash through the parts they find unseemly, sometimes a beta reader can help make it even better.

“We’ll work on it together,” you say. “I wouldn’t want to do it all myself.”

**Author's Note:**

> I mispronounced a lot of words because I learned them from reading. Purpose *does* sound stronger that way, ok?


End file.
